See-Think-Do: A Content, Marketing, Measurement Business Framework

The world does not need a new business framework. I get "About 269,000,000 results (0.25 seconds)" for business framework on Google today.

But most of the frameworks available to us solve for divisional silos. For example AIDA is from the siloed lens of Marketing (and full disclosure, I humbly believe serves company's own selfish perspective). Then there is Agile for engineering. And really the list is too long.

Most of the frameworks we have also don't optimally capture the complexity of digital marketing and measurement. For example, they don't account for a smart company's ability to form relationships at scale via mobile, social platforms with past, current, and, most importantly, future customers. Yes, they pay lip service, but what's now possible is beyond their imagination (failing faster, solving for the long tail at scale rather than just the head, the shift from interruption to being a part of a customer's life, every bit of your business existence solving for multiple outcomes, the incredible opportunity to truly power life with material data unimaginable just five years ago, and… so much more!).

I've been worrying about this quite a bit recently, and hence today's post comes from a deep desire to create a new, simpler lens through which we can look at all our activities (so hard!) to move all we do as a company to deliver higher profits.

Why build a framework? I love frameworks because they achieve the incredible in that they allow you to teach people how to think, rather than giving them a fish. A mixed metaphor, but you get my point. If I can teach you how to think about a problem, you are smart enough to then consider all the unique aspects of your business/reality and create a solution customized to your unique set of variables (which I would never know about). And it would be a solution that would rock because you created it rather than some consultant/"guru."

When I started to think about this latest framework, here's what I was trying to solve for:

* We talk the customer centricity game, but we rarely walk it. Just see the AIDA Wikipedia page linked above.

* We don't think about our marketing expansively enough. In addition to being worrisome, this also makes me mad because there is so much opportunity out there and we are squandering it.

* We (oh how I hate this) apply irrational and "narrow-view" measurement strategies toward understanding what is successful and what's not. Since you are what you measure, if you mess this up, you mess up what's good and what's bad and what's gloriously good.

Three important problems.

I'm going to share a framework that will change the way you think about multiple aspects of your business. Here are the four sub-sections:

Upon completing this post you'll have a new perspective that will simplify the immense complexity you deal with every day in your job. I promise.

Ready?

The See – Think – Do Framework:

(The framework has four steps, I'll reveal the fourth one at the end of this post. Don't jump. Stick with me, and these three, for now.)

My solution to these problems was to create a simple framework we can use to put our customers first, evaluate our marketing programs, and right-align our view of success (metrics).

The foundational elements of the framework are the consideration stages and the audience in each stage.

What consideration state might someone be in? What unifying view defines the audience in that stage?

For this example, assume I'm working as part of a business that sells clothing.

My definition of the audience in the See stage are "all people who wear clothes." Essentially, this is the largest possible way in which you can frame your potential audience. Largest.

If you are not a clothing company, your definition of the audience could be "all people who wear shoes," or "all people who are connected with microprocessors inside all IT companies in the world," or "all people who use phones."

The See stage is exclusionary, though. For example, it won't include anyone who does not wear clothes. Or anyone who does not wear shoes. Or anyone who works with microcontrollers.

That's the See stage.

In the Think consideration stage are "all people who wear clothes who think they might need some."

This is essentially a subset of the See audience delineated by even the slightest amount of intent (which we can infer from their behavior, as an example). We don't know when they might need some clothes. But we know that they are thinking they need new clothes.

In the Do consideration stage are "all people who wear clothes who think they might need some, and are currently looking to buy them." It’s a subset of the Think audience and perhaps the most desirable audience in the world. Everyone wants a piece of them. Or, all of them!

Three distinct consideration stages. See. Think. Do.

It is entirely possible that, in reality, purchase behavior is not always quite as funnel-ish as the stages above imply. Perhaps you wake up in the morning and walk into a store and buy new clothes (or expensive software from Oracle). There are some audiences who exhibit that behavior. But for the most part, each piece is distinct for normal people.

We have three consideration stages and three audiences, considered from their point of view and not ours.

This simple yet insightful framework allows us to look at all our digital (and dare I say non-digital) efforts with this structure and:

1. Identify gaps in our content/engagement/channel strategy on the web,

2. Truly reflect on whether our marketing and advertising initiatives are broad enough and optimized enough for each customer consideration stage, and finally

3. Answer the question: Are we truly measuring the efficiency/outcome/value from each stage optimally, or are we judging a fish by its ability to climb a tree?

Cool. It is amazing how many ah-ha moments you'll have.

The See – Think – Do Framework: Content Strategy

If we work in sales, all we care about are sales touch points. If we happen to work in marketing, all we care about are marketing touch points. If we are in customer service, all we care about is trying to answer the phones quickly.

All fair and good.

But the foundation to any company's success is to ensure that there is an attractive product/content for audiences to engage with in each of the three stages: See – Think – Do.

And that comes before you think about marketing/sales/advertising/billboards/tv.

Applied to digital… if your website (or mobile site or mobile app) only has content/engagement points intended for people to buy a product/service from you, then you will always have limited success. Because you are only targeting one consideration stage: Do.

See right.

If you want to grow your business, you are going to need content/engagement points for the See stage (the widest possible addressable audience) and for the Think stage (fill up your funnel at the very top, convince people early, build relationships, convert higher at a cheaper acquisition cost).

That way, when an audience chooses to engage with you digitally, you’ll have an engagement point perfectly suited for their consideration stage, no matter which stage it is. Even if they are not ready to buy, you get a relationship even if it is tentative initially.

Take ModCloth as an example. It is a great business for many wonderful reasons. One key, absolutely key, reason is that it is not just a Do business. It has a very well crafted See and Think strategy.

This fact is patently clear when you visit any product page on their website.

There is a very crystal clear Do engagement point. ADD TO BAG. All caps. Red. Outstanding. But they don't stop there.

If you are in the See or Think consideration stages, there are plenty of engagement points for you (marked in green and orange respectively).

Perhaps you just love clothes (or shoes or accessories or furniture or ….) and you would like to engage with the brand by being a virtual fashion buyer for a day! Or perhaps you want to sign up for their blog, or follow them on social media or… any of a bunch of other things.

Perhaps you love clothes and you think you might need some at some point. Well, you can sign up to be notified of when reviews of something you are considering are posted (PS: how clever is that, and why does Amazon not do this?). Or perhaps you want connect with one of their ModStylists (you get love and advice, they get a bigger part of your wallet in the future!). Or perhaps you want to create a wishlist (boom! micro-conversion). Or … any of a bunch of other things.

If your business, like ModCloth, has See and Think content strategies, you are ready to have a profit-busting, global-maxima-achieving marketing and measurement strategy.

If you don't, you are going to eat smaller meals, you are going to solve for a smaller (local) maxima, and you are going to take advantage of a tiny part of the opportunity out there.

It is just that simple.

I want to give you another example from an area most companies don't think about carefully when it comes to their content (engagement points) strategy — the greatest platform known to mankind at the moment, Mobile.

@WalmartLabs has multi-thousand people re-imagining the future for Walmart. One of their three key areas of innovation and focus is Mobile .

So, if you download the mobile app created as a result of these efforts, how big of a problem is it solving for Walmart? Here it is…

In this app, you can buy products, you can see your local ad, and you can check prices and find store hours. They've also built a widget (only for Android for now) where you can see a Value of the Day on your home screen. You can also get an eReceipt (but you can’t use it for returns).

Everything you might expect. [Actually, not everything you expect. When I look for Rollbacks in the Electronics department in my Walmart mobile app right now, here are the items listed above the fold: Crayola pencils, Spa Sensations bed frame, Mattress in a box, Rubbermaid Garment Closet and Neon Index Cards.]

Everything entirely focused on the Do stage and their existing customers. That's it.

What about people who might not yet be Walmart customers? What about people who might not be ready to buy right now (or ever on a mobile device)? Are they a lost cause? What about innovation? What about grabbing the incredible mobile opportunity by the throat and truly delivering for utility marketing and executing for mobile 2015 ?

Ok, ok, ok, let's focus. What about See and Think ?

Let's look at another company. I'm not sure if there is a multi-thousand people @walgreenslabs division. But Walgreens does have a mobile app. And I believe it is a very good example of See, ThinkandDo .

Unsurprisingly they are good at the Do consideration stage. It is a pretty cool app (like Walmart) — you can buy stuff and the experience is smooth.

Big whoop, right?

Now it gets better. For the Think consideration stage customers, they have handy dandy things like Pill Reminders. What a clever way to constantly stay connected to the customer!

It is not directly connected to making people buy stuff now, but surely they will in the future. And when they are ready to buy, there are clever ways to get your refills, or — even better — simply scan the prescription bottle you get from Walmart and, in a second, transfer that prescription to Walgreens!

Walgreens also bravely attempts to solve for the See stage (which contains the broadest possible audience). They have integrated with Instagram, instantly bringing a large audience who may or may not normally head into a Walgreens or even think of engaging with their mobile app. They also have a built-in photo editor where you can pull in any photo from your phone (or Facebook, et al.) and edit it. There is also a very cool feature where you can create an account (engagement point!) and earn rewards when you walk, run and track your weight. What a great way to connect with a larger audience then current customers, an audience that might want not want to buy now, and leverage mobile phones!

There are so many other things Walgreens could do to really kick it up a notch when it comes to the See consideration stage audiences. In the middle of the above picture you see some ideas from me that would be attractive to a massive no I'm not ready to buy now or I think of you in a very narrow way but I might be willing to give you my attention and time and connect with your brand and become a very valuable future customer audience.

Why not build a feature like the Decide app? I'm not sure exactly when to buy something, maybe you can alert me when the price is best. Why not help me get rid of all my various membership cards? You get competitive data, and you help me too. Why not enhance the Steps feature to a full-blown CardioTrainer-type feature? Why not let me scan the stuff in my kitchen right now, and then you tell me what to cook? Why not go all out and create something like Wanelo and funnel an amazing cluster of ideas constantly to make my life better, and create a customer?

Walgreens has done a fantastic job of applying non-normal thinking. Now that they have a See – Think – Do content strategy (like ModCloth, and like I'm sure your company) the obvious next step is to figure out how to create a equally worthy marketing strategy.

Let's go do just that.

The See – Think – Do Framework: Marketing Strategy

Step one towards having an exceptional See – Think – Do marketing strategy is to take a long hard look at what you are doing today. It starts with a question.

For example: When we buy display advertising, who are we solving for? Is it for the audience in the See stage? Is it for the audience in the Think stage? Or, is it for the audience in the Do stage?

The answer to that question has such an incredible impact on the execution strategy of that marketing program.

If it is for the audience in the See stage, your ad creative will be broad, your ad targeting strategy will be demographic, psychographic based (that's all you have to go on in See ) or maybe just geographic (based on where you do business), and your ad purpose will be primarily branding.

If it is for the audience in the Think stage, your ad creative will be a little narrower (so many ways to detect the initial hints of intent), your ad targeting strategy will be more specific (specific types of sites, content-driven ads, stronger ties to a particular category), and your ad purpose will be to present the value of your brand but also to drive some initial direct engagement with the brand (micro-conversions, for example, such as email address, video views, app downloads), a way into slightly stronger relationship with a possible future online or offline customer.

If your audience is in the Do stage, your ad creative will be much more focused (lots of intent signals possible), your ad targeting strategy will be intent-specific (retargeting, driven by prior history, full of intelligence from other customer like-type behavior, etc.), and your ad purpose will be to drive a $$$ outcome. If they want to spend, you want to show up first, smile, give them what they want, and take their money!

You can go through this exercise for everything you do.

If I'm doing SEO for keyword cluster xyz, what am I really solving for? See? Think? Do ? Yes, there will be some cases where the answer would be that clear cut. But often, you'll find that the keywords contain intent and if you think carefully about the consideration stage and the audience, you'll create different content for the landing pages, different calls to action, different types of optimization strategy, and everything else.

Ditto for PPC, your affiliate links (all likely in the Do stage), and your email marketing programs. You will send email type A to people in the See stage and email type B to people in the Think stage.

Get your marketing programs around the table and ask them: What are you solving for and is your execution strategy (creative, targeting, purpose/outcome) tied to the appropriate consideration stage?

Marketing clarity and focus comes from understanding — really understanding — what your marketing is solving for from the customer’s perspective.

You want sales, yes. But it is horrible marketing to do a BUY FROM ME NOW campaign to See stage customers. It is also rude.

At the end of this exercise, you'll end up with a really great understanding of what each of your marketing/acquisition strategy is solving for.

And if you have the power to have this discussion with the right management level in the company (sometimes we don't have that power, and that is ok), you'll also get to ask some really hard questions.

Take just the pink box above as an example. Display is only focused on the See stage. People who wear clothes.

You get to ask two questions:

1. Is our ad creative, targeting and purpose properly aligned with the consideration stage and audience?

2. Is this all we can accomplish from display advertising on the Internet?

The answer to question one will improve your current effectiveness (always important to show quick impact of your efforts). You can ensure that the ad creative, targeting, purpose, and subsequent mobile/desktop experience are optimized for the See consideration stage and audience.

The answer to question two might be more troubling. Surely, with all the data we have access to, all the behavior we have access to, and all the incredible creativity we can deploy across digital platforms, it is pretty darn awful to use digital display ads as glorified billboards or tv commercials. We. Can. Do. So. Much. More!

So why are we not doing that? Why such limited use of display? Is it our people? Is it their skills? Is it our Agency? Is it our management team's lack of ambition? What is it?

These are tough questions to answer (and now you know why I said "discussion with the right management level" earlier). But they are exactly the type of strategic questions that need to be answered in order to maximize the impact of our marketing and monetize the opportunity that exists in all three consideration stages.

These types of thought-provoking discussion lead to a better understanding of the marketing strategy and our current effectiveness monetizing it, as well as a new strategy to solve for the global maxima. In this case, for example, the discussion would result in a completely new way to think about display…

We now cover every consideration stage (only because display ads can work on every stage), and in each we use the optimal display advertising product exquisitely crafted to that specific consideration stage and audience.

No more running social ads with Do stage messages – it simply does not work. No more Product-centric pimpy ads in the See stage. No more BUY NOOOOOWWWWW ads on YouTube.

A display strategy that puts audience and their consideration stage first, and wraps advertising creative (content), targeting and purpose around that.

Hurray! Hurray!

For your company / industry you might create a different map. Maybe everyone is wrong and Facebook is the greatest gift to your industry because it is crawling with Do consideration stage audiences. Awesome. Move your social display ads to the Do stage, adapt your creative, targeting, purpose. Win.

Hurray! Hurray! Hurray!

Focus on the steps we went through in this exercise, the questions we asked, the considerations we made.

The cool thing is that you can use this exact template for all other marketing you do.

Let's look at the original picture again.

Remember the two questions above. Ask them. They'll lead you to these discussions….

Why is it that PPC is only targeted to people who are looking to buy right now when there are 14.6 million queries that we can easily identify in the Think and See consideration stages?

Why is it that SEO is only focused on our brand terms and product names, when there are 9 million additional intent-identified queries in the Do stage and 14.6 million queries we can identify in the Think and See stages? Oh, and what is that small SEO effort at the very top? What are we trying to accomplish, and why do we have nothing in the Think stage?

Why is it that your Affiliate program is targeted only to the bottom of the Do stage? Oh, that makes sense. It is the people who Google "Brand Name Coupon Code" after they see the "Enter Coupon Code" in your Shopping Cart. :)

You might also get asked this question: Wait, don't we have Facebook, Twitter and Google+ channels? Don't we already book, tweet, plus a lot? Yes? So what is all that solving for? Why did you buy all those Facebook ads last month? Hmm … "We are not really sure what we are doing, maybe we should ask Jay the intern who's our Social Media Guru-in-Residence?"

In each area for which you ask the questions, optimize what you do currently (question one) and then figure out the best way to expand your efforts to take advantage of the available opportunity (question two).

When you do that last bit, you'll go through the exercise we did above with display when we properly slotted remarketing-driven ads, content-driven ads, product-based ads, social ads, etc. into their optimal consideration stages.

You'll do it with Paid Search, with SEO, with YouTube, with Affiliate and Email marketing and every other thing you have going on inside your company.

You might end up with a picture that looks like this one … an approximate amalgamation of the best practices across the portfolio of companies I work with….

Or it might look a little different. You are B2C or B2Q or Non-profit or an Adult-oriented business. That's fine. Different is fine. It is the exercise that is important.

The See – Think – Do Framework: Measurement Strategy

Why is it that we had a poor, scattered marketing strategy in the first place? Why is it that the company did not have the robust marketing strategy you see above? Why was it not truly optimized for See – Think – Do?

Yes, you can chalk up part of the blame to the fact that they don't have the right people, the CEO is horrible (not!), the CMO is super old, yada, yada, yada.

I believe the explanation is much, much simpler.

Why did the company have such a poor paid search strategy? Why were they not monetizing the entire opportunity?

It judges everything by its ability to bring in money. Again, important.

But, depending on which benchmark you want to use, the average ecommerce conversion rate is around 2%.

You are judging the success of your entire marketing strategy through that two percent lens. And when you do that, you make bad decisions about your marketing effectiveness.

Only people in the Do consideration stage are ready to buy, or close to ready to buy. You should absolutely measure the success of your Do stage marketing portfolio based on that metric and since the song: : "Conversion rate, I love you so, I so, so, so love you, you are my beloved, you are my life, you are my everything!"

You know why that works? Because the consideration stage matches your marketing, which in turn matches the metric.

But all this falls apart when you try to judge the success of your See and Think consideration stage marketing campaigns using conversion rate. In those stages, the audience is simply not ready to hear your love song. They are not ready for your pimpy attention or aggressive raising of their interest, or for your desire to convince them to be interested in your product. Not yet. They are not there yet.

Visually, when you measure See and Think using conversion rate, this is what you are doing….

You are judging a fish by its ability to climb a tree.

A tiny minority will convert. But most people won't. They are simply not ready, they are not in that consideration stage.

But you use conversion, you notice there is almost none, you kill the campaigns. You cut off your legs to try and run faster.

PPC works for Think and See stages. It does help you find people who wear clothes and people who wear clothes who think they might need some. But if you use an imprecise view of success, like conversions, you are not going to find those people. You will lose the chance to engage with them, you won't be able to create a connection with them in the See and Think stages, and by the time they are in the Do stage, they might never even give you a chance to get in front of them.

Silent death, and you don't even know how much you are losing.

This makes me angry because it stops companies, large and small, from taking advantage of all the amazing digital possibilities.

This is the reason I routinely bump into people who say: "We don't do display, it does not work!" "We pulled all our money from Facebook, it is impossible to sell cars on it." "YouTube sucks at driving people to our stores." "It is a waste of time using Paid Search for upper funnel keyword queries by our customers. "

Arrrhhhh! Makes me so mad.

The framework fixes that problem.

It encourages you to use the optimal measurement strategy for each consideration stage. Use See metrics to measure success of your See marketing strategies, use Think metrics and Do metrics respectively for those two stages.

Judge success using a metric that tells you whether those marketing campaigns, with unique ad creative, targeting and purpose in each stage, are accomplishing what they are supposed to accomplish. Judge the fish by its ability to swim.

Once you have your marketing focus areas optimally aligned with their respective consideration stages, work with an Analysis Ninja inside your company/agency to identify the world's greatest metrics to measure performance in each stage.

This is what that picture might look like….

In the See stage you are simply trying to get the audience of people who wear clothes (/use phones/are connected to microprocessors/hold jobs at dentists) to be aware of your brand. That's it. This is the broadest possible audience you can find. Rather than gauging success with Do metrics, you should use the amount of interactions they have with your ads. For example, if you take over the YouTube home page Roadblock, judge success by the number of people who interacted with it. Or if you show an interstitial in the Expedia ad, measure interactions there. In both cases you are interrupting people, so just measure the success of that.

If your strategy is primarily Social, measure success using the best social media metrics: conversation, amplification, applause. For Display and PPC and SEO, consider measuring increased brand awareness. Some of these marketing mediums will send traffic to your site, measure their effectiveness at driving a new audience to you from the See stage (if your ads are targeted right), measure New Visits.

So on and so forth. Optimally align measures of success with what you are trying to accomplish in each audience consideration stage.

In the Think stage, things get a bit more sexy-cool. You know some of the audience is thinking of an outcome, they are just not ready to have a one night stand with you, not ready to buy right away. (Maybe some, though not a majority). Ok, that is fine. We'll optimize our marketing, and our measurement, to take advantage of the Think stage. We want people to engage with our ads (Click-Thru Rates). If they come to the site (mobile/desktop), we want them to not bounce and to engage with the site (Page Depth), and we want at least some of them to complete some micro-conversions that start a relationship with our brand (Per Visit Goal Value). Finally, we want to know if some of these marketing channels (Display, PPC, YT, Email, etc.) are engaging an audience in the Think stage that might convert in the future (% Assists).

In the Do stage, well I don't have to explain that one. You see the metrics above. You already obsess about them too much. :) The only surprise might be Loyalty. I consider it to be a powerful Do stage metric that exposes the customer behavior of multiple visits leading to one conversion.

Boom!

How cool is that?

Ad creative, ad targeting, and ad purpose judged against the job they are supposed to do. Now you can kill what does not work against these new metrics, because you are no longer judging a fish by its ability to climb a tree! Oh, by the way, you can totally pick different success metrics from my picture above. Just be sure to align them properly against each stage.

I want you to be aware of that brace on the right. By being silly and measuring everything against conversion we are not giving up on a high standard of accountability. We will measure cost effectiveness at every stage, we will judge that against economic value delivered against each stage, we will index against what we are paying per ad display/impression on TV and in Print, we will make sure every single dollar we spend is cost effective.

I'm sure some of you are like "Bah! Who cares? This seems to be a big company problem! I don't have an Analyst. I don't have all these paid advertising platforms. I barely have me and my cousin bringing in $500k per month in revenue."

This mental model and framework is for you too.

Your small/medium sized business picture will look like this….

In a nutshell, you use all the same metrics, just with slightly different depth and breadth (pick the ones most relevant to you). All free marketing, with each adapted to your need. Oh, and all free metrics too, 100% of which you can measure right now for free using something wonderful like Google Analytics.

Boom! Boom!

Now you are ready to truly take advantage of the opportunity digital presents, across a very wide audience, optimized via amazingly relevant metrics, all of which will power your long-term online and offline success.

Go, win big.

Epilogue: The See – Think – Do – Coddle Framework

Life does not stop at getting one order from a customer. It does not stop at getting the first B2B contract. That is just the first step towards their success, towards our success.

Any business that does not, with vehemence, focus on their existing customer base is being foolish.

For that exact reason, my framework has a fourth element: Coddle. :)

I hate the word retain, which is typically used to describe this fourth element. I hate it because it comes with the connotation that we are holding someone hostage. Retain our clients or they'll run/escape! With that word come appropriately pathetic strategies that can be summarized as What is the very minimum we can do to "retain" our customers?

I want us to aim higher.

Remember the Walmart mobile app? Barely even trying to retain (and, of course, nothing to expand audiences or coddle them). Another example, I'm 1k on United and they upgrade me every once in a while. I appreciate that, but given how much business I give them, there is not even one single action of four years of being 1k that I could identify as indulgent. Why not? Because I'm sure someone at United has checked a box off for retain when they send me 10 drink coupons at the start of the year (coupons I've never redeemed because I don't drink, yet they send every year).

I don't want you to be satisfied with the least you can do. Don't just aspire to retain.

A higher aspiration. (#1 above, not #2. :))

Another higher goal … I believe Land's End has a philosophy where they only consider someone to be a customer if they purchased a second time. I like that. In the first purchase, the customer just takes you for a spin. They might hate you. They might hate your product. They might become poor/rich. They might … so many things could go wrong. But if they come back to buy again, let's consider them to be a customer.

Here's the fourth element of the See – Think – Do framework….

Coddle your customers, people who buy from you more than twice.

Any company that treats its existing customers in an indulgent way will have to spend less getting new people into the door. Instead, they create (remember this pre-social media phrase) word of mouth, they create brand ambassadors. Existing customers are your buffer in bad times, they are … awesome.

But just like your new customers, you need to have an amazing Content, Marketing and Measurement strategy for your existing customers. Special websites. Customized mobile apps. Unique Search, Display, Social strategies. Special metrics (LTV anyone?).

Existing customers need their own See – Think – Do strategies. I hope this post has enough material for you to create strategies that ensure you Coddle your customers. I promise to write something on my own See – Think – Do strategies for the Coddle audience in the future.

As always, it is your turn now.

From your experience, is See – Think – Do a framework that would be a catalyst for some tough thinking inside your company? Does it hold the promise of unlocking new ideas and actions? Is your job structured such that for your focus area (content or marketing or measurement) you are responsible for See and Think and Do ? If your company is already executing on See – Think – Do – Coddle framework, what are some lessons the rest of us could benefit from?

Comments

Been reading your blog fervently over the past few months or so after getting a job in Marketing (You've coddled me, for sure). Your advice is always incredibly useful and even though it's not necessarily my role (yet) to tackle a lot of these problems, you've certainly helped me form a strong love for the data/analytics side of marketing – I shall be a ninja, yet!

This post resonated particularly with me, since your template is so easy to follow and so accessible for any business (I particularly liked your stripped back graph for smaller companies). I've been struggling to find a way to stress the importance of social media to my boss – "It can make us money!" doesn't quite cut it – but I know it can. Your See/Think/Do model is ideal for mapping out exactly how the more 'floaty' forms of marketing (viz. social media) can be represented in terms of getting leverage (rather than simply providing a bottom-line profit).

Not particularly adding much to the discussion, but merely celebrating how enlightening this post (and blog!) is, and what a difference it's made to my personal goals and aspirations in business.

Going to get to work right away on the best way to present this model to the company, in the hope that we'll finally optimise our marketing efforts.

Harshil, Ben: Please do share your learnings as you execute on this framework.

It would be good to add to the Think metrics you already see in the post. The challenge often is that someone's Think metrics at times are my Do metrics. So you might bump into those nuances at times. But should be fun to go through the unique situations your company/client.

This is SO great, Avinash. About two years ago, I stumbled upon the necessary insights to drive me towards creating something similar where I work. I segmented conversions by count of visit and was sad to see that we had one, maybe two visits in a journey that was over 15 searches long (a number Google had given us through a rep). Since then, I've been on quest to align channels and make sure we have enough in the see and think parts of the funnel in addition to improving what we have already in the do phase.

Of course, my terminology is different than what you've used in your framework, but it's really, really close. That said, what I really appreciated the most is how your frameworks are more about big ideas presented simply, but they never dumb down or leave out any of the important things.

Many of your ideas are self-evident by the time you've distilled them into what you want to say, which I think is half the battle when getting buy-in for new things. I love your choice of words, and the never cease to evaluate opportunities I have in my own communication. Thanks!

Since I read Web Analytics an Hour a Day, I've never seen data in the same way as before.

Then I got the pleasure of implementing the Digital Marketnig and Measurement Model on a personal project and I can say that it was the first time I launched a website with a back end plan for understanding goals and what the site is supposed to deliver.

Now you come and disrupt me again with this amazing post. I tip my hat to you Sir, thank you for the great advice you've continue to give us day to day.

I work with criminal defense lawyers and initially struggled with trying to help them understand how to target beyond people who have been arrested and immediately need a lawyer.

My approach was to get the lawyers to look at the bigger picture of Americans obsession with the law and become a source of information for everyone not just clients. This post has helped me further crystallize the strategy.

Roger: I wish I could tell you how delighted I'm to have your comment!

The use case you describe is an exquisite example of how to take a framework like See-Think-Do and re-frame the thinking of a group with a unique opportunity and unique desired outcomes. I'm so glad it was helpful to you.

-Avinash.
PS: I've had similar discussions with Real Estate professionals, and other types of service providers. Should be a fun post to write one of these days. :)

Fantastic. Once again you've taken a complex subject and created a simple path of logic to follow. I appreciate that above almost anything else related to intelligence. On top of that, you share with skill. So thank you for that as well.

As for the framework you've laid out here, I believe it's spot on. The faster businesses realize they need to be present in all of these stages, and optimized internally to support all of these stages, the faster they will see the results they covet, but seem to be so illusive. It's scary to really work on the changes internally that make this type of thinking really work efficiently. Many businesses of all sizes will struggle with that.

Those that can think beyond the 2% at the bottom, understand the changing tides of customers and the refreshing opportunity to be FRIENDS with customers, will trounce those that can't.

Build something awesome, connect with people because you actually care, and give them what they are after, or solve their problem when the time is right. It's a beautiful picture.

Todd: Thank you for highlighting the organizational implications of See – Think – Do.

The framework does create a disruption both from a strategic perspective (is a company organized to strategically and holistically across content, marketing and measurement?) and has people with the right skills (can they solve for the type of multistage complexity the framework demands?).

It is hard, but as you astutely put it…. organizations that get it and are set up for success (org structure, skills) will trounce those who don't.

This is simply wonderful; it's a wonderful culmination of all of the fragmented concepts of inbound marketing, content marketing, customer centricity, multiple-outcome-thinking, and more.

BUT… I suspect that – and my experience would suggest that – it's radically too aspirational, ambitious, agile and too alien a way of thinking for most 'real' organisations of any size.

I've been driven to blog in response; I'd love your thoughts on how realistic you think it is for companies to be thinking like this, when all evidence suggests that most organisations struggle even with the concepts of multi-touch, or 'nonline' (never mind the FTSE companies who don't even get AIDA as a model…)!

Jono: I'm in 100% agreement with you that See – Think – Do demands a non-trivial amount of effort to internalize and execute against. Lots of pain will be associated with it. It is a "crazy thing" to attempt.

But I'm reminded of something I’ve heard Larry Page say many times. Roughly paraphrased it is…. If you attempt a “crazy thing,” you are not going to have a lot of competition because people don’t like attempting crazy things. And even if you fail at it, you would have made more progress than if you were aiming for a 1% improvement (rather than 10x with your crazy effort). The cool part is that if you succeed, you’ll have the space to yourself for a while.

For that reason I call the tiny minority, you refer to in your post, winners. The rest will make do with scraps because they are looking for shortcuts, quick wins etc etc.

You've really given us a teaching tool, a way to communicate with our customers when we explain what we mean by creating an online strategy that includes all the things you talk about–SEO, social media and blogging, PPC, awesome content. This will help my business communicate better with the businesses we help.

And it will help us to focus on measuring the appropriate metrics. Judge a fish by its ability to swim, indeed.

What do you think about extending the framework with another sub-section that could be called: "The See – Think – Do Framework: Touchpoints", where you define and place websites, platforms and keywords where you think/know/suspect the given audience for each phase can be found, within the framework.

For instance, if you sell fashion clothes for women, the "See" fase could be connected with fashion blogs- and magazines, primarily mobile and with specific keywords, for instance [summer fashion 2013], [fashion inspiration], [best fashion blogs] etc.

This could further help you optimize the communication/marketing on the websites and platforms, where you want to be visible, for each audience.

One thing is marketing channels, another is intention within those channels. What do you think about that?

Lasse: As you dive into creating your own execution plan using the See-Think-Do framework you'll most definitely create sub-sections and engagement touch points that are clustered around your business objectives.

The exercise will be unique to each business, but you will do so for each of the four areas separately and against the marketing channels you'll use for each consideration stage.

Strongly agree with Avinash’s point in the "See-Think-Do Framework: Content Strategy" that building your page to optimize the Do stage purchase decision is far more likely to put you at a local maximum than separately setting goals for each area of engagement during the See and Think phases. Preaching to the choir for the team at ProductStructu.re as part of the bedrock of our component-based optimization strategy vs. whole-page optimizaiton/AB testing.

If an area of the site seeks to engage users in the See phase (i.e. logos, about pages, links to social media pages, blogs) optimize the content by targeting click-throughs or likes. For the areas targeting Think stage customers (login/registration, inviting friends, adding items to a wishlist, asking for notifications/newsletters) optimize for other relevant metrics (conversions, virality number of items added, notifications requested).

Despite each goal being self-contained in an area of the site, optimizing for these pre Do stage goals is far more effective than simply targeting whole-page revenue optimization in a single step or measuring every button according to direct effect on purchasing (best of luck my friends, funnels and habit paths are rarely ever as nice and neat as analytics software graphs want them to be).

Leron: My professional focus is on digital, hence that emphasis in this post for See – Think – Do. But there is nothing so unique that you can't use it for offline content / marketing / measurement.

You'll have to adapt it a little bit.

For content… you typically won't have a lot of people who'll randomly show up in a store so the See stage might apply a lot less. Think will apply a bit more (random shoppers are not as many as we would like), though less than for our online presence. Do of course applies totally.

For marketing… See applies pretty much as is in the post, Think as well for the most part, but it is very hard to detect the type of intent that Do online channels can deliver and so Do might not apply as much offline.

For measurement… Our ability to measure offline is quite limited because of all kinds of limitations. But to the extent possible we should use the guidance in this post for See, Think, Do to pick our offline metrics.

It is really difficult sometimes to communicate to clients how the interaction of SEO, PPC and Social Media Marketing all come together and act towards one goal
This will certainly help me explain better the what/why of the process.

I think the framework definitely puts a lot of things in perspective. When I started content marketing, I was just focusing on creating content, without understanding customer need. For the past couple of years, I have been obsessed with conversion, without understanding the "Stage of the customer". This week I interacted with one of our affiliate partners and he mentioned the idea of "early stage customers" (more like visitors, who are in "see mode"). The idea has been reinforced in this blog and I find this really interesting!

From my experience, I think that there could be the following bottlenecks in engaging users at each of these stages:

1) Intention: I am a clear cut leader in my space. Everybody knows about me and I dont want to talk about T-shirts. I am the big daddy in this business and just want to sell from my site. Maybe the benefit of engaging customers at see stage and the creating the clutter might not be worth it! Similarly I find that in e-commerce businesses in India, most of the players are concentrated on selling stuff. That is why they are able to sell most of the fast moving items very well. They are not able to engage with the users to sell complicated stuff like services.

2) Resources: Apart from an intention, resources are a main constraint to focus on each of these stage. The implementation of see, think and do is dependent upon how much resources that you have to engage people. For example if I have a capacity constraint to write 1 article in 15 days, then it may not be possible for me to engage users at the see stage. I might want to focus my energies on just the do stage.

3) Capability: Similarly, I may not have to capability or skills to engage the users at see stage (I have no content creation engine at that stage). In that case, I might just want to buy traffic from sites that solve this problem.

I believe the PPC works for all stages of customer life cycle. For example, we provide Finance Training certifications. We do PPC ads for keywords like:

1) See Stage: Finance Courses (Somebody looking for any course in Finance)

2) Think Stage: CFA (Somebody thinking about CFA… but does not know what he is thinking about! Probably not ready to buy right now!)

3) Do Stage: CFA Training in New York (hmm…. now he is really looking to Buy CFA Training Program)

I have been bidding on all the kinds of keywords. Played with creating landing pages for each keyword (which did not work that well… because the number of keywords is huge). But I think as your framework puts it in perspective of buying intent… if we created 3 kinds of landing pages, it might work well. I would give it a try!

I believe, If somebody can build their digital properties that can help transition customers from see –>think–>do–>Coddle mode, they will really do well!

You're correct in that so many clients question the value of See, Think metrics that I sometime resort to the Gary Vaynerchuk line "what's the value of your mother?" line to stress the importance of seeding the ground where customers are considering.

Kevin: Gary and I have had the privilege of gracing the same stage for industry keynotes, he is amazing.

Gary's challenge to all of us is to not be a slave to just quantitative perspectives, I agree with him on that completely. The See – Think – Do framework recommends an alignment of qualitative and quantitative metrics with customer expectations, thus avoiding the trap.

-Avinash.
PS: Gary is making a bigger point, but it is actually possible to calculate the impact of a mom on your life! There are tons of scientific studies. :)

Both you and Vaynerchuk are amazing and I do understand Gary's point, which is helpful to make when you've reached that tipping point where you can't advance beyond quantitative. See-Think-Do is a great framework for balance. Also, never needed to calculate the value of my mom, but good to know that I can back up her value if I need to ;)

Theunis: Absolutely! That is exactly where it would show up (and now it is clear why folks who try to optimize for See – Think stages based on Customer Lifetime Value sometimes find that frustrating).

Other metrics could be Revenue Incrementality we can establish from Marketing & Content strategies targeted to the Coddle stage. Depending on your platform, say for Mobile, you can also use Loyalty and Recency to measure success. In some scenarios we've also measured Amplification of various sorts and of course Profitability.

One challenge (as with all "customer journey" path frameworks)–how to adapt when your "customer" is an aggregate of individuals?

In B2B, those who see, those who think, and those who do are often not the same person. So how then to pragmatically determine that added "transmission cost" to convert the money spent engaging one into acquiring the other??

David: I agree that it is certainly a little bit complicated. But one simple way to get going is to shift our view from thinking about a person and start thinking about an entity (company) and judge success of our See – Think – Do strategy against that entity.

This is a bit tricky for our web analytics tools because almost all of them are visit centric and some of them are visitor centric, none of them are entity centric.

But if you are willing to be a bit more clever and work with some advanced permission based identity strategies, you can pull it off. Add to that a little bit with your offline B2B strategies (letters, tradeshows, calls) and you have the makings of, with some hard work, a great marketing and measurement strategy.

Love the ideas and analysis you give here, adding a 'Coddle' step is a stroke of genius. It's funny how many businesses forget this step so often and don't try to retain people. It's also good when you see a great example of someone doing this well (and not with little drinks vouchers that you won't use!).

I'm looking forward to seeing brands improve in this way in future. It's such a significant audience that you already have and they are often easier (and cheaper) to keep on board than it is to get new customers.

I'll definitely be recommending the Coddle step in future, it sounds much more real life than 'retain'!

I'm not familiar with most of those metrics suggested for measuring the success of your 'See' stage marketing (% interactions, conversation, amplification, applause, indexed increase in brand awareness, % new visits).

Can someone direct me to a resource on what these metrics are and how to collect them?

A long post I must say and so much info that I came back twice to finish it till the end.

This post has some resemblance with the attribution model but definitely a food for thought.

One of the best example that I did see was when I bought a 30 days food supplement from a website and exactly after 27 days I got a mail to fill my order with a discount code. I didn't really liked the product but definitely fell for the follow-up timing.

But its a bit difficult to find such product lines where you can actually follow this approach. And apart from it this may not be the best way for a small company without a dedicated DB Admin and Cloud and what not to keep the relevancy of the whole data (qualitative and quantitative both) to reach a conclusion out of it.

This article has highlighted my key issues that was being overlooked by my team. Since these days there is a lot of fragmentation in the E-commerce industry. This aspect is mostly underestimated by many E-stores.

The video is in a slightly different context than this post. But trying to marry a monkey with a water melon, :), feel is lightly present in See where we are trying to evoke a connection with our brand/product/service in the hearts of the largest possible audience. And it is strongly present in Think where we are actively trying to establish a connection with our brand/product/service for an audience where we can detect a stronger intent.

If we execute well in the Do, the "feel" will be strong in the Coddle stage.

With See-Think-Do we are working from the perspective of the customer and not the company or company employees – structuring our business, marketing and measurement around that reality.

1. See identifies the largest possible addressable audience. So if you were to start an insurance company when none existed, See would be everyone who could possibly use insurance. (Just as if we are a clothing company the largest possible audience is everyone who possibly wears clothes, but not naked people.)

2. Please accept my sincerest apologies for not understanding this one completely. In the last year I've had the opportunity to develop the model with a few companies, one of which is a $2.4 billion marketing budget CPG company. It worked well in framing what their marketing was solving for.

3. This reminds me of one of the early lessons in MBA school. Ford is not in the cars business, it is in the transportation business / it is in getting people from place x to place y efficiently business / it is in helping people get to their loved ones fast business. Each definition brings with it new possibilities. If a new social network defines its "largest addressable audience" as people on other social networks, they might suffer from limited success as you rightly point out.

It was really great to read your post and think about these complicated challenges.

Plan | Do | Check | Act works as well…. The right kinds of online activity associated with a well constructed business website help to grow our clients' online presence and contribute to a favourable organic seo score.

Randy: I'm not quite sure I understand PDCA. Is Do not Act? Perhaps what you mean is Plan – Do – Check – Rinse/Repeat?

See – Think – Do attempts to take the customer perspective and focuses on what the customer consideration stage is (for existing and new customers). Then it forces the company to act appropriately in each stage.

In that sense it flips the funnel from company inside-out perspective like PDCA (I think, if I'm understanding it right :)).

Thank you so much for this Avinash. Selfishly, your post came at the perfect time!

I'm currently pedaling my digital strategy for budget… Organising it into your framework it is really bringing clarity and simplicity to my ideas for the non-marketers and marketers that are saying yay or nae to me (hopefully, yay!). Coddle is somewhat shamelessly overlooked so will feature quite heavily, I look forward to seeing more from you on that.

I'm just transitioning into the Marketing world, but the way you were able to describe this framework made a lot of sense. Already I have clients purely focused on the return (aka dollar signs), but I think the beauty of embracing both traditional marketing and digital marketing is having the touch-points at all FOUR stages.

I would even go as far to say that the Coddle Stage is the most important stage, and is where the true value and benefit of digital marketing lies. I'm excited to apply this framework both to my own business and my future client's business.

Really great framework, or should I say new way of thinking. I especially like how this See, Think, Do framework can relate to mobile. I think when it comes to mobile, it is much easier to figure out someones intent. For instance mobile conversion rates are much lower than desktop conversion rates when it comes to the Do phase. Reason being is that usually on my phone I am just doing research on products. I think that advertisers can really take advantage of this by catering their mobile PPC campaigns towards people in the See and Think phases.

Also Facebook advertising is really great for the See phase, because you can target a really broad category of people. So if you are looking for "People who wear clothes", within Facebook you would just target people who have already said that they "Like" clothes.

Again great tips and some great tips on rethinking what is considered a conversion based on who the ads are being targeted towards.

Just caught your interview with @MitchJoel, Avinash. Always a total pleasure.

Love this framework you've developed and want to dig a little deeper. In my communication practice I've been using a "know, feel, do" framework and structural tension [creating] to help my clients build compelling communication strategies for the past 10 years or so.

I'm very far from your world of data analytics, so keen now to read the post itself to see where and how there's similarity and difference in these approaches.

It'd be really interesting to tracks users by see/think/do and work out the proportions over time. Obviously it'd be skewed by certain activities, but could be quite eye opening as something to view over time and see whether you're (unknowingly) putting more effort than you thought into see when the bottle neck is really do.

In the opening of the post I'd shared my reasons for developing See-Think-Do. A quick summary is that the ACTUL/A type frameworks were not developed with all the possibilities that now exist with digital, they are company centric rather than customer centric (just see the words) and, perhaps most importantly, ACTUL/A or AIDA type framework start with essentially the bottom of the Think stage because their first goal is Acquisition.

With See-Think-Do my goal is to start much higher, with no expectation of conversion (See stage) and no "shouting" in our marketing/advertising. In the past, think TV/Radio/Print etc. we simply could not do what we can with See today. In part that was my impetus.

I read this post with interest, and I find that it is a very good piece to structure thinking around marketing campaigns. Great piece that I intend to refer back to in future.

I had a question though: what if the marketing campaign we are running is aiming to bring about a behaviour change (rather than leverage / amplify an existing behaviour) would a different framework apply in that case? Or is there a step even before See?

Trisha: The definition of the See stage is: "Your largest possible qualified audience."

If you are trying to bring about a behavior change, you will define your See audience accordingly and ensure a fit to your business goals. Then in the think stage perhaps you'll define them as taking the next step relevant to your business. Finally the Do stage… we'll you know what happens there.

I agree with the thing that you have to be more into your prospect to do more progress. You have to build up a strategy on your market, that how many people are, see-er's, thinker-s and do-er's. Make a strategy and follow up with market trends and you will get more productivity.

Thanks for such a great post. We're beginning to implement this framework in earnest in our agency right now.

For a long time, we struggled with really trying to measure the value of things we did beyond just conversions. So far, we've received a positive response from clients as well as from our own internal teams. It has fundamentally changed the way we do our marketing and especially our reporting.

I've been reading your blog with gusto for the last month or so, simply fantastic.

I should also note the caveat that I am a novice at some of this stuff compared to some of the commenters here. In any case, you wrote:

"Why is it that SEO is only focused on our brand terms and product names, when there are 9 million additional intent-identified queries in the Do stage and 14.6 million queries we can identify in the Think and See stages?"

In your wonderful post about Long-tail keywords (and in some of your other posts as well, I believe), you recommend (at least this is what I took away) that SEO could well focus on the 5-15 head keywords with strong PPC efforts being given to the many thousands of long tail keywords. Of course, not that SEO should only focus on those, but mainly as that greatly simplifies things. Based on what you wrote above RE: the millions of potential queries that could play into an SEO strategy, I am slightly confused. Can you please clarify?

First… we will normally have a very small number of keywords that bring us a ton of traffic. Around 15-20 of our top keywords. Usually brand keywords. We should obsess about these like crazy, do everything we can to make sure we retain the traffic and do whatever we can to grow it. This is the head.

Second… there is an incredible opportunity out there of hundreds to thousands to a few million key words (usually key phrases) that individually bring us small number of visits but when you count up the variations it is a gigantic pool of traffic. These are category key words. This is your tail.

Obsess about your head (usually in the Do bucket) and obsess about your tail (think and see). That is how to win big with search, that is how to win completely with search.

But "brand love" is all See, and a part of Think. None of those people are ready to buy (in fact for See they might not buy for a while so what you want is "brand love").

I'm toying with different words for the last stage. In this post I use Coddle. I'm playing with Care and Love. Let's see which one survives. Regardless of the name, it is people who've done business with you twice of more. As a business your Marketing, Customer Service, Loyalty/Retention, functions will have responsibilities for people in that stage.

I am a big fan of Mod Cloth, and I just noticed something new they are doing. They are making quick videos of some of the clothes, so you can see them in motion on a real person. Then at the end you can share the vid with a friend.

Hi Avinash – thanks for this. I really like this framework as it helps our team to think beyond B2B/B2C/sector and dare i say, best practice on the markets to focus on the customer

We've been struggling to reduce bounce rates on our homepage for awhile and have recently taken up the See-Think-Do framework and turned the idea into a new grid design that will fulfill the customer needs this way.

At the moment we are testing the original homepage version against the new one, initial results (first few days) we are seeing bounces reduced from well over 58% to 38% only. Very encouraging!

I highly agree with Mr. Kaushick’s idea of Think See Do. I could give you an idea of how this works in retail much as he did. I could also tell you how I intend to use it in my upcoming senior project. However, the best way to show how this works is in another social medium, the idea of converting someone to the Church of Jesus-Christ of Latter Day Saints.

Can you imagine how successful we would be if missionaries only concentrated on the “do” section of the program? Missionaries just knocking on people’s doors, introducing themselves, and then grabbing a Gatorade bucket and asking if they are ready to be baptized? It certainly would not work.

But contacting investigators is of the “see” portion of the program. Investigators see our missionaries about, there is ample information on church websites, youtube, and much more media. Even with these new social outlets, the church is wise enough to know that all of these cannot replace what is truly necessary for the next stage.

This would be the “think” stage. This would be the true investigators of the church. At this point, they may have visited the church, looking at scriptures a bit, asking questions, and many other non-committed avenues of investigation. The functions that parallel into this idea are the social functions of the church such as the pot-luck dinners, firesides, cookout, and hopefully non-violent ward basketball games.

They “do” stage is really the final push towards baptism. Missionaries may ask if the investigator is ready to be converted. Maybe, even the investigator themselves will ask for the spiritual dip. Either way, to get to this point, any missionary will tell you that few that seem to go to the “do” phase generally go inactive shortly thereafter.

For a new church member to have a strong foundation, all three of these steps must be acquired. The same should go for any strategy pertaining to gaining a new customer base, and keeping it.

James: Thank you for sharing your thoughts! I have to admit I'd not thought of an application of See-Think-Do for missionary work, but you have opened my eyes!

Totally agree with your Do description, definitely will be less effective (for exactly the same reasons as might apply for an ecommerce website or branding effort online).

The Church of Jesus-Christ of Latter Day Saints does a pretty good job of having a Think and Do strategy online, and they also do a great job of the Care (Coddle) stage via their offline strategy (provide community support, events, church engagements etc).

There is, I humbly believe, a need for a stronger See strategy for the LDS. Remember, there is no "commercial intent" in the See stage. So people are not yet thinking about the LDS or religious needs (or feel they don't have any). What can the LDS do to reach this largest addressable qualified audience? I think there are opportunities here.

Should the line "Ad creative, targeting, and purpose judged against the job they are supposed to do." be edited to read: "Add creative, targeting, and purpose, judged against the job they are supposed to do."

There are many different ways in which you can discern the intent of the visitors. It could be from the keywords they used to get to your site, or other types of ads, or the pages they are viewing on the site, etc.

With that in mind, you can certainly consider using category pages, recommendation engines, product selectors and other such content as aligning more closely to Think intent. On the outcome side people who sign up for email campaigns, watch certain videos, download various things on your site are all also illustrative of Think intent.

You can certainly optimize them to see how you can do better in delivering against that customer intent.

Hi Avinash. I've come to the party a little late but wanted to add my perspective anyway.

In my role, I'm responsible for both initial client-whispering as well as ongoing liaisoning between my marketing agency teams and our clients. It is my job to make sure the client understands the digital marketing proposals we deliver. And it's helpful when they clearly get the benefits of each piece.

This framework presents an excellent structure for presenting metrics and reports to clients!

To a business person who clearly knows their objectives and goals – this framework allows for metrics and analytics to be delivered and consumed IN CONTEXT with what the different tactics we are using were designed to do in the first place.

With a greater understanding, the business folk can make much more intelligent decisions on how to evolve their marketing choices for ever improving results.

We're about to implement the framework in my department. Hooray! I'm hoping you can answer two questions for me:

1. Is there a target ratio for size of the STD audiences? For example, would it matter if our underfunded See campaigns only reach 25 people/mo and our Do campaigns reach 1,000 people/mo? Or is audience size irrelevant as long as performance rates are good?

2. We place ads and write sponsored content in some industry e-newsletters. How can we determine if these ads or articles should be tailored for a See, Think, or Do audience? (Since we don't own these platforms, we can't segment the audience or run multiple campaigns. Each send list sees one of our ads, once a month.) (FWIW, we do use custom campaign links, so we can at least track the behavior of those who click through.)

If it matters, we're a B2B software company with a very niche market.

Thank you for your help. I've read both STD articles multiple times over the past few years (I even have one of the STD charts hanging on my cube wall), and I'm so excited to finally put the framework into practice.

1. At the very core of S-T-D-C is the magical word: Intent. Hence, we identify and engage with as much intent as is out there. Intent identified by our audience's behavior.

Hence there are no pre-fabricated targets, and the size of each intent cluster might change with time/season etc. Our execution strategy is to maximize whatever is out there.

2. You are doing the right thing, tracking the clicks will help you understand if the content is resonating. Hence, experiment with content that solves for different clusters of intent to identify what works best.

When doing these e-newsletters, I also spend time with the source (industry association in your case) to try and understand who they think is in the audience and what all the other content is in the newsletter. That helps me ensure my content (ad in your case) is aligned with audience's intent.

Everything is important and the way you describe it in the article is quite understandable: see, think, do.

I have watched advertising online improve for over a decade. Consumers from other parts of the world can contact businesses, allowing brands to expand their presence internationally. It's also easy for business content to get lost online. With everyone using the internet, your services for relevant customers can go unseen.

Are they complementary? Do they depend on the type of product?
The way I see it, they are not separated by intent but by the company's intent (not the customer!) which may harm in the long run. The Acquisiton step seems very easy but in reality, before Activation (which is some kind of "Do") a lot of things should happen (See + Think).

Santiago: See-Think-Do-Care is a strategic business framework. It encompass the highest level thinking thinking on three of the most critical elements – Content, Marketing, Measurement. Included in the Content bit are elements of org structure, employee skills and business priorities.

Pirate Metrics is a wonderful recommendation for the tactical metrics that will help you diagnose success of your sales efforts.

Excellent article on content and marketing, it is the most eye-opening that I have read in a long time.

In my experience it will take a lot to get the old school marketers to pivot to intent as they are rooted to what they have always done. Technology is driving changes that might cause change to be inevitable.

Excellent article that is rich in content and provides an innovative strategy for every type of business.

What I loved the most was your intrinsic desire to teach people who to think. Most authors prescribe a specific solution which only applies in a narrow area. Teaching people to think allows them to go create numerous specific solutions.

For the See intent cluster, I suggest focusing on just the first part: "For seeing the needs." And, in terms of execution, focus on if you can contribute anything to that as a company. Remember, there is no commercial intent in See. That means, you can't "pimp." But, we can still contribute value to the current and future customers via our content strategy.

The audience perspective you explained from the end of Buyers is very good and acceptable, and the example stated about Modcloth has made me think of that, but the action to buy the product is totally in the hands of the audience.

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[…]
Avinash Kaushik, whom I have an enormous amount of respect for as a marketer, a speaker and an educator, has posted a summary of a new framework for digital marketing strategy and measurement. It's great. Superb. Perfect, and unequivocally right. A conjunction of all of the content marketing, RCS and inbound philosophies into an elegant model. However, it's just unachievable. Real companies are almost invariably too incapable, dull, culturally stagnant or simply inept to even aspire to this kind of thinking, and in lieu of this are exclusively interested in short-cuts, marketing hacks and quick wins – and of course, the career amplification of the individuals who ride the short-lived waves of success that these tactics deliver.
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What Next? See-Think-Do Categorization. As luck would have it, Avinash Kaushik published a post early this morning discussing a framework for content, which he refers to as See-Think-Do. I was drawn to the thinking behind it and feel that it could supplant the old AIDA (Attention, Interest, Desire, Action) framework for many marketers. See-Think-Do segments possible customer behaviors and content offerings into three categories which I will apply to our smartwatch example:
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As part of web analytics commentator’s Avinash Kaushik’s recent post on his Occam’s Razor web analytics blog https://www.kaushik.net/avinash/see-think-do-content-marketing-measurement-business-framework/#seethinkdocontent he perhaps inadvertently points out the importance of user engagement for eCommerce sites and also highlights the importance into segmenting your site into specific goal areas rather than optimizing a page purely on revenue metrics. Preaching to the choir for the team as part of the bedrock of ProductStructure’s component-based optimization strategy!
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Avinash Kaushik believes framework is an essential component of effective marketing. Luckily, you won’t have to build a framework for your content and marketing strategies from scratch; he’s already built it! Get right into this post to peer into an interesting framework for marketing.
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See, Think, Do Framework on Avinash’s blog
Avinash if famous for his ability to walk-the-walk and talk-the-talk, so I’d been looking forward to seeing this self-confessed hater of all things shit when it comes to marketing. He started out with a very bold statement “We have a very narrow view of marketing; I want to expand your view” which to be fair he delivered on fully.
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I ran across this great post on content marketing from Avinash’s Blog “Occam’s Razor” (BTW, if you don’t subscribe to his blog, you’re missing the most cutting-edge stuff out there on digital analytics). He calls it the SEE — THINK — DO framework. And, this is kinda the endpoint of your content marketing — the measurement end.
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7. See-Think-Do: A Content, Marketing, Measurement Business Framework Post by: Avinash Kaushik Move beyond AIDA. See, think, and do are the three most valuable stages in your business framework, allowing you to put customers first and still meet your strategic objectives.
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See-Think-Do: A Content, Marketing, Measurement Business Framework by Avinash is the long form version of his session at MozCon, and it is something every marketer should read, understand and apply.
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See-Think-Do: A Content, Marketing, Measurement Business Framework. A frame work that will change the way you think about your business in four parts: Do Framework, Content Strategy, Marketing Strategy and a surprise.
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To get one thing straight right in the beginning: I think that the See-Think-Do framework of Avinash Kaushik is really awesome. The framework connects all the ideas of marketing in a simple and beautiful way.
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This provides the C-Suite (or whoever else approves your budget) with an opportunity to review the KPIs you're proposing to serve as an indication of progress. It also allows them to provide their feedback for additional KPIs they'd like to track. From this conversation you can gauge whether you need to spend some more time on education and buy-in. Keep in mind that not everything is easily measured. And not everything is going to be measured in Google Analytics. Be creative with how you can prove the value of your efforts. Avinash has some great posts to get you thinking in this direction.
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But then how are these advertisements different. I think they are different because they work on the following two levels. They are clear about their understanding of who they are looking at reaching out to , or what phase of the see- think – do stage there at. More importantly they understand the whole emotional tumult that s associated with a disease not just for the patient but also his care givers, friends and family.
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DW: It is hard to know how branding influences work, but it is possible to understand quite well which sources led people to the website in different stages of the acquisition process. In my view, a great framework that can be used for such is Avinash Kaushik's See-Think-Do.
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When it comes to marketing, it isn’t all about conversions. Well, it really is all about conversions but your entire marketing strategy can’t be about hoping to show up at that right moment before purchase. You need to spend more time thinking about the Think and See consideration stages.
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Avinash proposes a new marketing framework around content marketing called, “See, Think, Do.” I like this framework because it helps online marketers like us to approach content marketing problems with a framework with which to solve them. But what is the “problem” around content marketing? The problem is how do you deliver the right content, at the right time, to the right audience? And your online content, whether in the form of posts, articles, ads, or whatever, if it’s not delivered right, at the right time, to the right audience, well it’s pretty much just a waste of time and money.
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What if you could find a marketing medium that would allow you to engage your ideal customer and satisfy their information needs across each stage of the buying process? If that sounds like something beneficial to you, then Social Media just became the most valuable marketplace for your business. Avinash Kaushik, Google’s Digital Marketing Evangelist, recently wrote about a straightforward framework strategy to put your customers first, evaluate your marketing programs, and right-align your view of success (metrics). It’s aptly named See – Think – Do.
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It’s usually easiest to start with Conversion goals – purchasing a product, completing the ‘Contact Us’ form, signing up for emails. You don’t want to stop there though. Try to develop goals that relate to audiences who may not yet be ready to convert, those that are just starting to engage with you and those who you are still building a relationship with. Avinash Kaushik, a thought leader in the field of web analytics, has a great framework that encapsulates these audiences: See-Think-Do. The widest audience Sees your content, those who are further down the funnel Think about and engage with it and eventually (ideally) convert (Do).
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This will definitely help connect the dots between content consumption and actual top line impact. By looking at the value of all goals and purchases that included views of your target content, you can get a picture of the return from your writing efforts. If you are writing content around a specific product category or offering, you can look at your break-even point or target return level, and use this data to determine if you’re hitting the mark. Mr. Kaushik again has an excellent summary of this process, if you need greater detail.
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2. Frameworks. Analysis can be baked in to the data by structuring or superimposing a structure on big or small data. At its simplest, data points are mapped to a category, like time exploring and happiness to an engagement metric. Mapping data points to a larger framework, like Usability-Engagement-Conversion (Change Sciences), or See-Think-Do (Avinash Kaushik), or Descriptive/Perception/Outcomes (Forrester) synthesizes big and small, quantitative and qualitative, into a system for measurement.
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2. Frameworks. Analysis can be baked in to the data by structuring or superimposing a structure on big or small data. At its simplest, data points are mapped to a category, like time exploring and happiness to an engagement metric. Mapping data points to a larger framework, like Usability-Engagement-Conversion (Change Sciences), or See-Think-Do (Avinash Kaushik), or Descriptive/Perception/Outcomes (Forrester) synthesizes big and small, quantitative and qualitative, into a system for measurement.
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In the middle of this problem, I stumbled upon a podcast where Avinash breaks down his See, Think, Do Framework (Ok, seriously…go back and click that link. And then read it. All of it. You’ll be glad you did).
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Charlebois alluded that Google will be releasing a “Brand Measurement Toolkit” that will include more cognitive and emotional KPIs. Google’s vision for brand measurement will be highly based on the “See-Think-Do” framework developed by Avinash Kaushik. With this new tool, advertisers will understand whether their campaign was seen by the right people, what they thought and what they did.
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Throughout the year we had iterated many different versions of reporting with our clients in an attempt to effectively communicate the value of what we do. Our Experience With See, Think, Do – A Reporting Framework was a big victory for us. Adapting Avinash’s framework for use at Mack Web was a breakthrough in our approach and certainly in effectively presenting how our efforts (heavily weighted in content and social media) affect the entire brand, revenue and all.
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The value of having a framework is to see how all your content creation, distribution and measurement fits into supporting continual improvement in achieving your overriding goals. For more information on creating a framework that serves as the foundation of a powerful marketing strategy, check out Avinash Kaushik’s insightful post called See-Think-Do: A Content Marketing, Measurement and Business Framework. It’s a valuable tool to step back and take a look at your overall content strategy from the perspective of your audience.
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So, we’re looking to create products and/or services that can help a brand leapfrog both their competitors and the more traditional ways of connecting with consumers. From there, we build a framework for success (and, if you’re struggling to understand the difference between a framework and ROI, check out Avinash Kaushik‘s amazing article titled, See-Think-Do: A Content, Marketing, Measurement Business Framework). Once we have that product or service (and yes, that could be an e-commerce solution, a game, an app, social media initiatives, a website, etc…) and a framework for it, it becomes a question of communications. From the communications standpoint, we’re trying to leverage a healthy mix of paid, earned and owned models to help the brand to be successful.
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So, we’re looking to create products and/or services that can help a brand leapfrog both their competitors and the more traditional ways of connecting with consumers. From there, we build a framework for success (and, if you’re struggling to understand the difference between a framework and ROI, check out Avinash Kaushik‘s amazing article titled, See-Think-Do: A Content, Marketing, Measurement Business Framework). Once we have that product or service (and yes, that could be an e-commerce solution, a game, an app, social media initiatives, a website, etc…) and a framework for it, it becomes a question of communications.
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To delve deeper into this analysis, let’s consider Avinash’s content creation model. When Avinash published his article “See-Think-Do: A Content, Marketing, Measurement Business Framework,” he summarized the online buying process, dividing it into three major stages.
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Analytics (#sexymagic!) sits squarely in his wheelhouse and he discussed how using precise measurements can help marketers generate and nurture leads. He had a fresh take on marketing and I was immediately intrigued. I think you will be, too (get more details here).
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This was proving a major barrier in clients adopting proper tagging and I had been thinking of a cleaner way to do this for awhile when I recently clicked through on a blogpost by Avinash from google plus. The first thing I noticed was he had added utm parameters (ofc he did :D) but on closer look it was tagged ?utm_source=social-media&utm_medium=twitterfbgp wouldnt it be useful if we knew the exact social network? (granular the better as I always say) and that too without overhead of creating multiple short urls.
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We’ve also undergone a Strat Ops scrub, a time for company self-reflection in which we concluded both that we needed our reports to work and that they were dismally failing to do so. We discovered Avinash Kaushik’s famous See, Think, Do framework and decided to model our reports accordingly.
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A podcast by Joel Mitchel, author of CTRL+ATL+DELETE caught my eye, entitled When Fish Climb Trees and other stories with Avinash Kaushik. These 2 fine gentlemen were discussing a blog post entitled See-Think-Do, where Avinash proposes a framework for walking the customer centricity game while acknowledging my death by KPIs anxieties.
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He went on to explain Google’s advocacy of HTML5 software (which is optimised to work across fixed-line and mobile screens), further highlighting that earlier studies demonstrate that such ad units performed better (in terms of click through rates) than those developed with the more widely-used flash software. “This means that agencies can pivot their strategy towards a ‘seeing strategy’ on movie using HTML5 software,” according to Ferguson, adding that Google is spreading it programmatic message using the mantra ‘See, Think and Do‘.
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At the end of the day it’s about how many impressions, clicks and conversions ranking on the first page will net given the volume and competitiveness of a keyword. Although the tactical approach is effective for driving direct response goals, which are much easier to report on, it sacrifices major audience segments in different stages of the Buyer Journey. Avinash Kaushik puts it this way in his article See, Think and Do: A Content, Marketing, Measurement Business Framework.
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In recent years, nothing has crystallized this process as cogently (for me) as Avinash Kaushik (Google‘s digital marketing evangelist and author of Web Analytics – An Hour A Day and Web Analytics 2.0) has done with his See – Think – Do – Care Business Framework. Yes, stop reading this blog post and spend an hour or so reading what Avinash has to say. What Avinash has done so well (and yes, his post is over a year old) is this: it’s a practical and adaptable framework that works for all brands, because it is highly customizable and relies on you, the brand marketer, to think with more of a business perspective.
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Most websites have a 2% conversion rate, if you are lucky. Implement the See – Think – Do – Care model into your marketing thinking. Understand intentions of your prospects, throw away demographics and look at commercial intent.
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The best employees/consultants obsess about optimizing for a Marketing Portfolio and possess the incredible capacity to understand each channel's purpose, are able to recommend content matches in response to the customer need, and finally measure success of that portfolio strategy. [I call this the See-Think-Do-Care framework.]
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Google’s analytics evangelist, argues that trying to measure an upstream (read: not SEM) campaign by conversion is ridiculous because “In those stages, the audience is simply not ready to hear your love song. They are not ready for your pimpy attention or aggressive raising of their interest, or for your desire to convince them to be interested in your product.”
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First to speak was David Lloyd who leads Google’s fashion retail vertical in the UK. As you would expect he had a wealth of statistics and spoke in depth about Google’s marketing framework “See – Think – Do – Care”. Perhaps not surprisingly there was a strong focus on mobile and its relevance to search. In 2013 smart phone search overtook desktop for the first time on Xmas day. In 2014 we reached a true tipping point and now more people use a mobile device to look for information online.
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The first step while creating content is to define what your page is about and who are you targeting. If that is not defined properly, you will never be able to create good content. Are you creating content to sell a product? Or is the page about giving information about a product? Or is it something in between? Avinash Kaushik very well defines this very well in one of his articles. I will summarize it here for you.
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In one sentence, you have to cover every touch-point with the right ‘tools’, and measure their effectiveness based on what each of them is supposed to deliver. For a more comprehensive read on the topic, I recommend this article by Avinash Kaushik, colleague at Google and great thinker on digital.
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Avinash Kaushik’s See-Think-Do framework brings together marketing, business, and content. Lately, in my consulting work, I’ve been using metrics relating to five principles of positive design: ease of use, trust, creativity, connection, and meaning. The core idea of a framework is to tie together measures across the organization, while remaining flexible enough to accommodate new metrics as goals change and new ideas take hold.
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You also have Kaushik’s See, Think, Do concept that highlights metrics for each stage in the customer journey, but you can use it equally well to guide content creation and set goals for the content marketing campaign.
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Here’s a continuum of processes that I first saw on Avinash Kaushik’s excellent blog, the See / Think / Do framework. You have to first see. This means to learn how to analyze data, develop insights, understand what happened and why. Once you know what has happened, once you’ve done your homework, you can think about what to do next. This is the essence of strategy.
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On the other hand, apps have a relatively higher adoption hurdle compared to websites, and users need to install the app first, and that creates friction. Depending on where the user is in their relationship with you, they might prefer to just browse your site. One nifty framework to determine the types of users you've got (and when an app or a site will serve your needs best) is Avinash Kaushik’s See-Think-Do-Care.
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Avinash Kaushik's framework is popular buzz-topic these days. Loads of articles and presentations talk about it, I am sure there will come some e-books or something like that. But that's theory. In this presentation you can see an example of Facebook ads campaign built on this framework.
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O’Rourke calls on the wisdom of Avinash Kaushik, who argues that “the foundation to any company’s success is to ensure that there is an attractive product/content for audiences to engage with in each of the three stages: See – Think – Do.” This framework taps into the patterns that continually appear in our search for content, consumption of media, and decision-making process says O’Rourke. The people who visit a site fall into three predictable streams:
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What KPIs should we use? This is a question I get more often than “How are you?”. Therefore I wanted to share my current best thinking. As always, I launch and iterate, but from where I stand today I believe this makes sense. First, a quick recap of the consumer journey along the See-Think-Do-Care framework (Avinash):
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O’Rourke calls on the wisdom of Avinash Kaushik, who argues that “the foundation to any company’s success is to ensure that there is an attractive product/content for audiences to engage with in each of the three stages: See – Think – Do.” This framework taps into the patterns that continually appear in our search for content, consumption of media, and decision-making process says O’Rourke. The people who visit a site fall into three predictable streams:
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Avinash criticizes marketers for focusing too heavily on the do stage. He notes that websites that have heavy calls to action for purchase and metrics focused on conversion are missing out on winning potential customer share of mind at the see and think stage.
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Personas can be segmented into one of three stages of a customer journey, See, Think, Do, a framework popularized by Avinash Kaushik. Collateral in the “See” stage is meant to support brand awareness. It can be engaging and entertaining, but should not have a call to action. “Think” collateral is created to educate and inform, or to change a prospect’s perception about a product or service. “Do” collateral is highly actionable with a strong call to action.
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Remember how I said search and social media have turned it on its side, and broken it apart? Remember that graphic from Think with Google? That’s all true, but the problem is, without the conceptual framework of a customer journey that the purchase funnel provides, many brands struggle to market to customers who might be at different stages of consideration.
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This is the million-dollar question that a lot of us scratch our heads about. However, there are some things you should do to improve conversions through organic search. Simply stated, it’s all about intent. Avinash Kaushik, Google’s Digital Marketing evangelist, came up with See-Think-Do: A Content, Marketing, Measurement Business Framework, a framework that categorizes users into different consideration stages based on intent.
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Winston Burton gives us two important factors in this short post: He refers to Avinash Kauchnik’s” See-Think-Do: A Content, Marketing, Measurement Business Framework”. It’s a framework that categorizes users into different consideration stages based on intent.
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To put it simple, it’s about the intent. According Avinash Kaushik who is Google’s digital marketing evangelist, you have to SEE, Think and Do. It’s actually a framework he came up with. The framework is all about measuring content marketing activities. The idea here is to categorize users into multiple stages based on their intent.
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One of the corrective efforts that can be seen in this regard is a framework by the well-known analytics expert and blogger Avinash Kaushik which is termed SEE, THINK, DO. In his blog post he provides a detailed explanation of why it is critical to identify the underlying Intent of customers and classify them as ‘SEE’ for those who just got to see or hear about the business, ‘THINK’ for those who are actively considering a purchase, and ‘DO’ for those who engage in a purchase or other form of transaction with a business.
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The first step in understanding whether or not your SEO is increasing your conversion rate is to assess your current SEO. Understanding the intentions of your website visitors is the key to cracking the conversion-rate code. Not all customers are here to buy. It may be the goal, but it’s simply not the reality. Google’s digital marketing expert, Avinash Kaushik, breaks down website visitors into three categories – see, think, and do:
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According to Avinash Kaushik, most marketing models are very selfish, or “company looking out.” The first step to bringing your marketing department to modern standards it to adopt a more customer-centric approach. Avinash’s See-Think-Do framework is a great way to structure your marketing to align with the customer’s needs at each stage in their journey.
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Almost 3 years ago Avinash Kaushik published his See-Think-Do Business Framework on his blog. It’s a fairly simple framework that divides audience targeting into 3 audience consideration stages:
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Start by thinking about different types of customers from the view of whole buying cycle. You can use See-Think-Do framework by Avinash Kaushik. Next, you need to identify touchpoints. These are the places where you will find people interesting for the website. Keep in mind that these people will be in different stages of buying process. These touchpoints can be both, online and offline. Some of these touchpoints may not even exist before you intentionally create them.
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See-Think-Do is a marketing framework consisting of a series of “consideration states,” conceived by Avinash Kaushik. Because it is customer-centric and aligns well with the Iterative Marketing methodology, we refer to it often. Let’s summarize Kaushik’s main ideas and expand on them to make this framework even more powerful.
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Avinash Kaushik, he’s the guru over at Google Analytics, has a great way of looking at the marketing funnel that he calls, See, Think, Do. And, here’s his graphic. Notice, the marketing focus changes as consumers move down the marketing funnel, which means you need activities that fit each of these tactics.
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Avinash Kaushik, a digital marketing evangelist at Google, developed the See-Think-Do framework which helps marketers to put their clients first, evaluate their marketing programs, and align their views of success, i.e., metrics. But how exactly do these categories of search intent impact conversions? Our chat participants shared their opinions and advice on how to craft your CRO strategy accordingly.
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The problem was simply a matter of timing. They might be interested later, but they aren’t right now for whatever reason. Rather than having them bounce off my site and lose them forever, it would be better to capture their contact information and nurture my relationship with them until they are ready to purchase. Avinash Kaushik created a framework around this idea called See-Think-Do. The idea is that prospective customers are in one of three phases:
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I’m referring to the marketing model envisioned by Avinash Kaushik, digital marketing evangelist at Google, called “See, Think, Do.” His framework applies to all types of marketing strategies, regardless of the channel. Let’s look at how to apply this framework to discussions around the implementation of optimizing a website for organic search.
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Not only does focusing purely on the bottom of the funnel miss opportunities, it can also put off consumers who are positioned higher up the funnel and do not respond well to that type of messaging. Avinash Kushaik (link) (the original analytics guru) is renowned for his framework “See, Think, Do” which is based on the same principles. He highlights in his writing on content marketing frameworks how crazy it is to focus on just the bottom of the funnel.
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That’s because they all have a specific place in the buyer funnel. That’s the whole process from when a potential customer becomes aware of a problem, starts looking for a solution and then eventually purchases.
To map that funnel, I use a framework that was created by Avinash Kaushik.
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Definitely. Bigger foreign players just like Amazon or Zalando are entering the Czech market soon and there is also a pressure of local competition and higher advertising prices. You will have to concentrate on the See and Care stage, from the well-known framework “See Think Do Care”. It won’t be possible to compete on the market only with the PPC advertising. A customer aftercare service will be soon a key to success.
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A solid agency will give you reasonable timelines and expectations. If you’re not sure where to begin, a popular starting framework is based on the “See, Think Do Model” developed by Avanash Kaushik. Simply put, your goals should answer the questions: “What do I want my potential customers to see, then think and finally do?” As they progress along through that process, each step is a potential metric for you and your agency to measure. The truth is, no matter who you work with, an agency will succeed only with clear instructions on what they should do.
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There have been a few frameworks developed by experts in the field to help do this. Whilst they are all quite similar, the four areas of the framework below are taken (roughly) from one by Google’s Digital Marketing Evangelist Avinash Kaushik.
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In any other case, it’s worth distinguishing between content for landing pages, blogs, and product pages. The latter must answer all questions about your product and describe and show the product in the best, most comprehensive way possible. For blogs and landing pages, I personally like the “See-Think-Do-Care” framework, originally invented by Avinash Kaushik.
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I realise that is a lot of information but I think it’s crucial to emphasise the importance of different types of consumers and how at each stage, different marketing strategies need to be implemented in order to draw them in and make a purchase! (Kaushik.com explains this really well!)
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Once you’ve outlined your content needs and goals, your available resources (writers, budget, campaign management time, etc.), and the findings of your content audit, develop a content plan with a calendar. In the calendar there are two types of content marketing to keep in mind: Inbound and Outbound.
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You may have heard this called the Awareness-Consideration-Decision (ACD) funnel or, the See-Think-Do process. It’s the same Buyer’s Journey dressed up in different terminology. The key is to match what you’re offering with the right stage of the Buyer’s Journey, and keyword research informs your ability to do that. Spoiler alert: People don’t buy anything until the end of that journey, so don’t push for a hard sell until the third stage, when you can see that they’re interested.
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Introduced by our professor, Avinash Kaushik has a very comprehensive blog post about this matter. In his blog, Kaushik gives a lot of great and simple examples that are easy to read and understand. In his words, “all people who wear clothes” is the broadest definition he could give to an audience. This is See. Basically whichever your company provides, whether it is a product or service, categorize your audience as all people who use the category.
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First off, most would be aware that there are a ton of frameworks that talk about the “customer funnel”; these generally talk about moving customers from awareness to consideration to purchasing. Personally, I’m a fan of Avinash Kaushik’s “See, Think, Do” framework. Essentially, the framework allows us to understand how our marketing messages should adapt to a user’s intent.
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“Personalization is everything, after they’ve purchased,” says Jon as he shares a business framework called See,Think, Do, Care, the brainchild of Google resident genius Avinash Kaushik. For our discussion in the podcast, the framework suggests that the time to leverage personalization to maximum effect would be after the consumer has become a customer.
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See – Think – Do. Each one of these methodologies can provide a unique benefit and framework to understand how good design impacts your business. Once you are actively measuring UX metrics, it will become transparent what activities are the best at driving a return for your organization.
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